The Internet Takes Over
(a special guest column)
There has never before been an innovation that has so thoroughly made its way across the world and into the lives of culturally diverse peoples than the internet. The global network is credited with the improvement of peoples' access to information, the speeding up of business and finance, and of significantly altering and bolstering the cultural landscape of hundreds of nations. The internet has truly taken over a huge number of the aspects of our lives.
We now conduct an increasingly large proportion of our shopping activities online. We head online to retailers such as Amazon to buy our electronics, we can order our groceries to our front doors, we browse through eBay on the bus to work; all of these things, in the past, took up a huge amount of time compared to nowadays where, postage limitations accounted for, the transaction is near-instantaneous.
Board games and crosswords have been replaced with stunning high definition video games played on consoles and computers that pack an enormous amount of processing power, all created for the incredibly popular sphere of online gaming. It's not just consoles and first person shooters that have had the internet treatment though.
Online casino gaming is a huge, multi-billion dollar industry these days, as players with smartphones enjoy games such as poker, blackjack, roulette and slots from the comfort of, well, wherever they happen to be! Clicking on a game review site such as Yeboyescasino you can plainly see how many of these online gaming providers there are out there, and the rate of growth is only increasing.
In the media world, the internet is now pretty much king. Whilst many of us will still head over to the local cinema to catch the latest movie releases, the video purchasing and video rental industries have taken a massive hit from the internet- just look at Blockbuster Video! Services such as Netflix and other video on-demand products have now firmly established themselves as the primary means with which people watch their favourite programmes and films.
The new approach to media is far more self-centric than ever before. Buying an album or compilation record used to 'force' you to buy a load of songs you necessarily didn't want to listen to, but now with services such as iTunes an Spotify, users can access as much music as they want to, at any time, creating compilations and playlists of their own design. We no longer pay for disks, we pay for subscriptions, defaulting the physical ownership of media in favour of a ridiculously massive selection of media being provided to us instead.
Who knows what the future of the internet will bring. Looking around us today though, there aren't all that many more aspects of our lives it could potentially integrate with!
